City council would be making “a significant and major mistake” by allowing Glebe shops to open on six holidays, says Sean McKenny, president of the Ottawa and District Labour Council.

The labour group plans to ask the mayor and councillors to block a staff recommendation to make shopping legal in the Glebe on some statutory holidays.

And the organization says it would consider an appeal to the Ontario Municipal Board if city council approves the measure.

The Glebe BIA has asked the city’s permission for retailers to open New Year’s Day, Family Day, Victoria Day, Canada Day, Labour Day and Thanksgiving Day, plus any future holidays declared by the province.

Council’s finance and economic development committee is inviting residents to weigh in on the shopping proposal at a meeting Tuesday. City council is scheduled to vote on the committee’s decision Feb. 10.

McKenny argues those are days families want to be together rather than be scheduled to work.

“It’s incumbent upon our city council to ensure that we have that piece in play in our city,” McKenny said.

McKenny said he’s concerned city council will allow other retail districts to open on holidays if the Glebe BIA receives permission.

People who live near Lansdowne Park want the city to do a better job enforcing its own noise bylaw because loud music is keeping them up at night.

No one is supposed to operate amplifiers and speakers between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. if it disturbs the peace and comfort of people in their homes or businesses, according to Ottawa bylaw 2004-253.

But events at Lansdowne Park — particularly dance parties and wedding receptions in the Aberdeen Pavilion and Horticulture building — appear to be doing just that. And some residents say they’re fed up.

On Wednesday night, Michael Vickers says he could hear loud noise coming from an event inside the Aberdeen Pavilion after 11 p.m.

Although he has registered complaints on at least 10 previous occasions, he didn’t call bylaw this time because the response, he says, often seems skeptical.

“Nobody cares about the disruption that that’s causing,” said Vickers, who lives a few hundred metres north of Lansdowne’s Holmwood Street entrance. “The response we’ve had from bylaw officers and other people is, ‘You’re just these anti-Lansdowne people and you’re whining again.'”

Noise disruptions are a common — and at times complex — irritant for some city dwellers and, in this case, the problem appears to be worst for those who live in a small cluster of homes near Lansdowne’s northern edge.

Lansdowne Report Card: FARMERS’ MARKET

Lansdowne Report Card

The farmers. They’re working really hard and overcoming big obstacles to bring their produce to the city, and setting up attractive stalls in spite of the hassles (like nowhere for them to store things or park nearby.)

It’s a fabulous new opportunity for the market to operate year round, inside the Aberdeen Pavilion in winter. It opened again Sunday, Jan. 10, and will open each Sunday, right through to next year’s Christmas market.

The outdoor area has some upsides compared to previous sites, such as good drainage.

NEEDS IMPROVEMENT:

The city and OSEG need to treat Ottawa Farmers’ Market as a valuable asset, not an afterthought. By spring, the city should provide the outdoor amenities it promised.

OSEG should not mess with market hours, as it has in the past.

Free parking should be offered for market customers, at least for a limited time.

Signs on Bank Street and the Queen Elizabeth Driveway, and in the underground garage, should remind people about the market and how to get to it.

A welcoming, shaded spot should be created for pausing and picnicking near the market.

Consideration should be given to making the Aberdeen Pavilion the market’s exclusive home, with permanent stalls, like Montreal’s Atwater and Toronto’s St. Lawrence, with a big enough range of products that it’s a one-stop shopping and tourist draw.

Lansdowne Report Card: PUBLIC SPACES

Lansdowne Report Card

The Skating Court: With the lights of the Aberdeen Pavilion and the rest of Lansdowne as a backdrop, this is perhaps the most picturesque skating rink in Ottawa, at least among those measuring less than 7 km in length.

The Great Lawn: Whether you’re into solitary yoga or a concert with your 15,000 closest friends, this is a great outdoor space.

NEEDS IMPROVEMENT:

Playground: For all of Lansdowne’s supposed grandeur and inclusiveness, youngsters got the short end of the planner’s stick.

Aberdeen Pavilion and Horticulture Building: Arguably the two most attractive buildings at Lansdowne, they require more, and better, usage.

The design competition for the urban park at Lansdowne came quite late in the years-long process to settle on a redevelopment plan, leading critics to charge that the public areas were simply an afterthought to appease those opposed to the boxy commercial buildings.

Still, the $42-million publicly funded project – which included moving and refurbishing the Horticulture Building – was a far cry from the original plan to split $5 million in landscaping costs with OSEG. The results are meeting with mixed reviews, although of the all elements at the new Lansdowne, the public spaces can be easily improved over time with more programming and additional components.

Lansdowne Report Card: RETAIL

Lansdowne Report Card

Select venues: Whole Foods is a favourite for those who seek GMO-free produce and “responsibly caught” seafood, while the Cineplex VIP is a cushy place to catch a movie. Winners might not be a big overall draw, but it’s popular with the clerks and food servers who work in the park. Among bars and restaurants, the airy faux-industrial Local Public Eatery has a happy vibe.

NEEDS IMPROVEMENT:

Parking and promotion: Many in Ottawa think Lansdowne has only limited parking. Developers need to talk up its vast underground garage — with free parking for customers of the movie theatres and some larger stores — and how most spots remain open to shoppers on game days. Efforts are underway to brighten the underground space. Sacrificing a few spots to open some tight corners would also help.

Atmosphere: The developers and City of Ottawa can do more to enliven the zone with music, art shows and similar added-value attractions. The skating rink that opened last winter is a good start.

For shoppers, for diners, really for anyone tired of the same old same old, the 2010 report offered a candy shop window of inducements.

Just imagine, it suggested, a swath of Lansdowne Park transformed into a “unique urban village with interesting stores, cafés, restaurants, services, cinemas … ”

Imagine, it purred, a place where you can sign up for adventure travel, watch a chef prepare a new creation, take in a 3-D demonstration at a sports store or simply relax on a “see-and-be-seen patio.”

Lansdowne Report Card

Game days are the best time to see Lansdowne Park as its most enthusiastic cheerleaders want it to be seen — a buzzing hive of activity where thousands of Ottawa RedBlacks fans converge, packing the bars and restaurants to scarf down burgers and beer before taking their seats in TD Place stadium.

And there was perhaps no better game in the team’s sophomore season than the Nov. 22 CFL eastern conference final against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, which the RedBlacks clinched in the dying minutes thanks to a once-in-a-lifetime catch by receiver Greg Ellingson.

There were 25,091 people in the stands on that sunny, crisp autumn afternoon, and dozens more watching for free from a nearby knoll or inside toasty new condos that overlook the stadium.

While some streamed onto the field for an impromptu post-game party, others high-tailed it to the restaurants on Marché Way, which quickly filled up. The wait for a table at Jack Astor’s was soon an hour long.

Lansdowne was — as its slogan says — live.

Only skeptics, with their heels firmly dug in, would say the finished product is worse than what was there before — an underused island of asphalt in the heart of the city.

It’s true some of the pieces haven’t lived up to their early promise. Lansdowne is less ambitious or unique than many hoped; less civic crown jewel and more cubic zirconia.

There are other black eyes and bruises as well — a mess of lawsuits from subcontractors, including one from the now-bankrupt company that built the stadium’s iconic wooden veil; a retail mix that, in the words of the area’s city councillor, is “predictably disappointing,” and a shaky start for the venerable Ottawa Farmer’s Market, which has seen its foot traffic decline dramatically since returning to Lansdowne from Brewer Park in Old Ottawa South.

With some modest improvements, however, the park could yet become a place people embrace, every day of the year.

The firm that built the signature wooden ‘veil’ on TD Place stadium went bankrupt. Other contractors are suing for millions. James Bagnall reveals the legal scars left by Lansdowne Park’s facelift.

One of Eric Sommer’s greatest joys is creating wood structures that transform ordinary buildings, infusing them with new shapes and warmth.

It was his company — Spring Valley Classic Custom — that installed the signature wooden veil that envelops the south side of TD Place, the rebuilt stadium at the heart of a reborn Lansdowne Park.

Sommer translated the inspiration of architect Robert Claiborne into a lattice of wood and steel so precise that nowhere is there a spot for water to collect and begin the process of decay. The structure, which incorporates more than 12 kilometres of Alaskan yellow cedar, should age gracefully.

“It’s a work of art,” Sommer said wistfully from his company headquarters in Jerseyville, a small town just west of Hamilton.

The $7-million job should have been the pinnacle of Sommer’s 27-year career.

Instead, it ruined him.

Spring Valley filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 28. Seventy workers lost their jobs.

“I won’t bring my family to Ottawa to see what we built,” Sommer said afterwards. “I couldn’t bear it.”

Eric Sommer at the office of his now-bankrupt company in Jerseyville, Ont. GLENN LOWSON / OTTAWA CITIZEN

Sommer lost everything after putting his “heart and soul” into building the one structure at Lansdowne that would become a landmark in the city. But while bankruptcies are not uncommon in the complex world of large-scale construction, Spring Valley was far from the only firm on the Lansdowne site that saw large invoices unpaid.

The finance committee has endorsed a deal to end the city's $23.6-million dispute with its Lansdowne Park business partners, despite a legal opinion that says the city would likely win if the matter went to arbitration.

The Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group (OSEG) and the city differ over who's responsible for work related to repairing rusty steel structures in the arena's roof, which were discovered after a contract had been signed, and other costs for bringing the retail area up to the same design standard as elsewhere in the park.

OSEG believes the roof repair is beyond the scope of the agreement it signed with the city, so the city should pay; the city believes the bill belongs to OSEG.

A legal opinion from Gowling Lafleur Henderson, shared in confidence with councillors, says that on every front the Gowlings lawyers think the city would probably win. On the big-ticket steel, OSEG knew that rain leaked into the Civic Centre hockey arena from above — not least because it dripped into Ottawa 67's owner and OSEG partner Jeff Hunt's private box. OSEG had a report in hand suggesting that the steel in the arena roof, which supported the concourse for the football stadium built on top of it, had probably been exposed to a lot of water.

The developers might not have known precisely what they were getting into, the legal opinion says, but they knew they were taking a risk when they signed a deal to take on renovating the stadium and arena at a fixed price.